14,000 draft notices mistakenly sent to men born in 1800s

No, the United States military isn’t trying to build a force of centenarians.

It just seems that way after the Selective Service System mistakenly sent notices to more than 14,000 Pennsylvania men born between 1893 and 1897, ordering them to register for the nation’s military draft. The agency realized the error when it began receiving calls from bewildered families last week.

Selective Service spokesman Pat Schuback tells The Associated Press that the error originated with the Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles, which sent the federal agency a batch of records of males born between 1993 and 1997 mixed with the records of men born a century earlier.

Schuback says that families who received the notices in error can simply ignore them.